


not for a very long time

by deathtosanepeople



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Canon Autistic Character, Denial of Feelings, F/M, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 23:25:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8773603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathtosanepeople/pseuds/deathtosanepeople
Summary: Junkrat can't properly apply sunscreen. Symmetra decides to help. It, surprisingly, does not end well.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [erinns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/erinns/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Your Body Is a Weapon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7072693) by [vargrimar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargrimar/pseuds/vargrimar). 



> A gift for my lovely best friend erinns, who has dragged me back into rarepair hell. Thanks babe!
> 
> This is of course inspired by that magnificent piece of fanfiction by vargrimar, Your Body Is a Weapon. An idle conversation with erinns about the (AMAZING) beach chapter, turned into a short one-shot. 
> 
> me: god is it too much to hope that she'll go rub some sunscreen on junkrat bc he refuses to do it himself? or maybe mercy demands he do it and he misses like, everywhere, and so satya can't help but do the missing parts? idk i just... i need that good god
> 
> erinns: I need that too now! Thx
> 
> Ask and thou shalt receive. Merry Hallowgiving.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

_It’s incredibly irritating,_ she thinks, and tries to look anywhere but at the uneven swaths of sunscreen smeared down Junkrat’s back.  
  
Mercy had hounded him until he’d given in, insisting that he apply some protection against the sun’s rays, lest he end up in the same predicament as the last time they went to the beach.  
  
Some irrational part of Satya had considered it an impossible thing for this burning man to burn; he is scorching fire skin and iron hot bones, snapping amber coals for eyes, and a red tongue, darting like a flickering flame— and yet, he had indeed burned.  
  
She had observed before how uncomfortable it was to see him hurt, and this devious sunburn only served to reaffirm this observation.  
  
He had been miserable for days, loping around the compound with a downturned face, his posture even more bent than usual. His cheeriness, puns, and laughter had been replaced by mumbling and occasional moaning.   
  
Honestly, it had been pitiful.  
  
She’d tried to convince him to go to Mercy, but he had refused, just as he had refused to heal the violent purple bruise latched onto his throat by Genji.   
  
And so, days and days of his less than stellar moods permeated the workshop, blew through the hallways like a roiling sandstorm, and scorched those that dared get too close.  
  
Mercy had found out eventually, Junkrat made the mistake of thinking she wouldn’t notice when he didn’t show up to his appointments, and he paid dearly for it.  
  
And by paid dearly, Satya means he received a severe talking to, which, as before, seem to be surprisingly effective on him. He went meekly to his appointment, and received his treatment without complaint, and Mercy made him promise he would put on the sunscreen provided next time they visited the beach.  
  
Hence, the current attempt to apply said sunscreen, hence, the slopped arcs of white up and down the smooth planes of his back. Even from her seat on her towel, a hundred or so feet away, she can see giant gaps where the sunblock has missed entirely.   
  
The man only had one hand, what else was to be expected?   
  
She twists the towel between her fingers, hoping someone will notice, Mercy perhaps, or even Tracer. Maybe Roadhog? She doubts he’d bother, but she is grasping at straws, trying to ignore that all too familiar frisson of longing tickling in her fingertips.   
  
Longing to touch, to smooth, to soothe, trace and taste—  
  
She shakes her head, her sun-heated hair falling around her face. Lord Shiva, what has gotten into her?   
  
She can just— go over there and tell him he’s missed a few spots, right? That’s what a friend would do. And if in the process she can avoid an entire week of disgruntled, skin-scorched bomber, then all the better.   
  
She stands and starts walking towards him, weaving even paced prints into the sand. She’s taking her time, she knows, and rising unbidden in her mind, she remembers Mercy’s knowing smile, her gentle accusation of Satya’s dawdling.  
  
She picks up the pace involuntarily, the smile and the words driving behind her like the salt sharp wind.   
  
He looks up when she reaches him, a pleased smile twisting up the corner of his lips. “G’day,” he says, and she ignores how strangled her heart feels at the fondness layered over that one word.  
  
She observes that his chest is in the same predicament as his back, sloppy and uneven, and gives him what she hopes is disapproving stare.   
  
“When Mercy told you to put sunscreen on, I think she meant all over your body, not just select parts of it.”  
  
“Oi! I’m doing my best here!” He waves his bad arm at her, head cocked as if to say: “Remember this little deal here?”  
  
“You could have asked for help,” she observes, reasonably.   
  
He smirks, gold canines peeking out from under his curling lip. “And who’d want to be all close and friendly with all me parts? Nobody’s going to be lining up to lather me in oil.”  
  
The words slip past her lips like birds from a cage, fluttering, racing, eager to be free. “I wouldn’t mind.”  
  
For a moment they both wear mirror expressions of shock, hers resultant of disbelief in her runaway mouth, his in the implied, and unintentional, innuendo.   
  
“Helping you, I mean,” she amends, scrambling to gather her dignity. It is a fruitless task, it slips from her grasp, loose and shifting like the grains of sand beneath her feet.   
  
She expects him to grin, wide and somewhat mocking, like he’s in on some great cosmic joke that concerns her ineptitude in keeping her head around him.  
  
He doesn’t.   
  
He just stares.  
  
“You wouldn’t,” he says. It’s low and quiet, and there’s a ragged quality to it, disbelief mixed with… yearning?  
  
“I would,” she replies, her posture straightening in defiance, her arms coming up in a barrier against her chest, as if that will hide the erratic pounding in her chest. “If you asked nicely.”  
  
His gaze is heavy, eyes narrowing slightly as he studies her, slits of sunlit gold.  
  
“That’s what friends do, correct?” She counters defensively, the stare lancing fever through her limbs. “They help eachother. If you need assistance you merely have to ask.”  
  
He breaks the unnerving eye contact and reaches to his left, grabbing the bottle of sunscreen Mercy had given him. He pops the cap and raises it for her to take, his eyes once again returning to her own, something close to vulnerability flickering in their tawny yellow depths.   
  
“Please,” he whispers hoarsely, and the strangest sense of grief cascades over her, powerful and heavy, like ocean waves.  
  
So much rawness in a single sound, it feels wrong hearing it, like staring into an open wound.   
  
It brings her slowly to her knees, that rawness, has her tucking herself slightly behind and to the side of him, and as she presses a dollop of the white liquid into her palm, it suddenly occurs to her to wonder how long it has been since anyone would have touched Junkrat in a non-violent, non-clinical, gentle way.   
  
The answer, from what little she knows of Junkrat’s past, would seem to be an obvious and heart-wrenching; _not for a very long time._  
  
And as she lays her lotion slicked hands against the flushed and freckled planes of back, and he lets out a small whimper that is quickly subdued by his good hand hastily mashing against his mouth, it occurs to her that this is a very, very bad idea.  
  
 _“When did I become the one with the worst plans?”_ she thinks, and she cannot tell if her hands are trembling, or if Junkrat’s blazingly pyretic skin is shuddering beneath her palms.  
  
She keeps her touches light and quick, never staying too long in one place, spreading the lotion as quickly as possible. It doesn’t seem to help, he’s pressing into her, rounding his back, curving into the cusp of her hands. Her lifelines tingle with the closeness, the unbearable warmth, and she wants, gods she wants _everything._  
  
Her thoughts are racing by, blindingly quick, jumbled and joyful, while she looks on in a detached sort of horror.    
  
 _taste his neck and touch his chest and feel his heart thrum in time to yours and outline the freckles and moles and birthmarks rolling beneath your palms breathe him in the ash the earth the burning brimstone_  
  
To the ancient Greeks, the experience of such extreme emotion, whether of delight or distress, could induce a person’s soul to leave their body and stand beside them, and so hers does, disconnected and disturbed by the raucous pining piled against her ribs.  
  
Him being this close is irradiating her defenses, seeping into her skull, zipping through her veins. She moves to lather his arms, her eyes closing, trying to find some center, some focus to calm herself.  
  
She feels rather than sees the jerking shudder that shakes his frame as her hand ghosts over the end of his bad arm. The noise he makes is nearly drowned by the waves, nearly lost among the seagulls conversations, but her darkened vision brings intense clarity to her other senses, and her nose is nearly pressed against the sinewy arch of his neck, and she _hears_ the breathy, desperate whine that escapes him.   
  
_“Satya.”_  
  
It rings round and round in her head and in the cage of her ribs, _raw and empty and desperate desire, love hope grief fear want need— It’s too much, she can’t, she can’t—_ she scrambles away from him, a backwards crab crawl, sand sticking unpleasantly to her lotion covered palms.    
  
She stands abruptly, and then sways, weak as a blade of grass bending in the breeze.   
  
She dredges her voice up from somewhere, taking a pickaxe to her vocal chords, carving out words.  
  
“I think that’s good enough,” her voice is rough and hewn with desperation. “You’ll have to get the rest yourself, I’m afraid the remainder is out of my jurisdiction.”   
  
She’s trying for teasing, for anything beside the terror that’s rucking up between her lungs, battering at the entrance of her throat.   
  
She doesn’t succeed, she can see it in the way he hunches inwards, his shoulders curling with defeat, his head bent almost to his knees.  
  
She should stay, make this right, fix what she had so carelessly blundered into and then rent apart.   
  
She does not.  
  
Satya Vaswani— top student of Vishkar, builder and architect, striving to build a better world, a more perfect society, a fighter, a diplomat, a strategist, a friend, a teammate— flees like she is still that terrified child from Hyderabad city.  
  
She runs, sand kicking up behind her heels.   
  
She runs, and she does not look back.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this captured both the characters well, tbh with you I JUST discovered this ship when erinns sent me vagrimar's fic, which I consumed in less than two days because it was so incredibly good. If I've made any mistakes please let me know, constructive criticism and reviews are always highly appreciated.
> 
> This ship has really got me smitten, and I'm so thankful to vagrimar for how beautifully she's portrayed it. Hopefully this little thing does justice to the wonderful universe she's weaved.


End file.
